20 August 2012 3:21 PM

You can’t really make excuses for a country with a bullying, overbearing leader, a country that locks up journalists and political opponents of the government. The fact that it has elections doesn’t make it free, does it? Well, no. The country I am in fact describing here is Turkey, which at the last count had 95 journalists behind bars, and where the bizarre and sinister Ergenekon prosecution is a pretext for the arrest (and often lengthy pre-trial detention) of opponents of Mr Erdogan, the country’s bossy, thin-skinned premier. The Economist, and other respectable organs , ceaselessly call Mr Erdogan’s government ‘mildly Islamist’ . What does he have to do to stop being called ‘mild’, I wonder?

Turkey, I might remind readers, is a longstanding member of NATO, or ‘ally’ in the current struggle by the ‘West’ to turn Syria into a sectarian bloodbath in the name of ‘democracy’ . It is possible (though I think now unlikely) that it will become a fellow member of the European Union, with all the dubious blessings of the European Arrest Warrant, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Europol and Schengen.

Eh? I thought this was going to be about those sweet, demure young women who have been locked up by the wicked Mr Putin? Oh , but it is, it is. I make no excuses for Mr Putin. I have many times used very rude words about him, and his government. I shall continue to do so. His spokesman won’t talk to me. I just wanted to point out that if you were a media organisation wishing to get exercised about a serious threat to free speech in an important country, you might pay some attention to Turkey. But hardly anyone does. Rather the reverse.

But Mr Putin is the object of a great and continuing storm of piffle and exaggeration. We are told that the trial of three young women, for behaving badly in a church, is comparable to Stalin’s show trials (before which the defendants had been tortured and blackmailed and at the end of which the defendants were shot in the back of the neck) or (more modestly) with the Daniel and Synyavsky trial which marked the end of the Krushchev Thaw in 1965 , at which, if memory serves me, there was not a large Western media circus, or much in the way of demonstrations outside the courtroom. In fact, as far as I know, only scrappy smuggled accounts reached the outside world, and Moscow’s then wholly-Communist media (nowadays by contrast startlingly varied and plural), ran a bitter co-ordinated campaign against the two. Their supposed crime was entirely a matter of freedom of expression.

But here come the New Cold War merchants (they want one, and soon) , trying to tell us that militarily decrepit, non-ideological, oil-dependent, rustbucket Russia is in some way comparable to the USSR, a vast militaristic imperial power allied to a global ideology which maintained its rule over many countries well beyond its true sphere of influence, , language and culture.

As to Pussy Riot itself, I’m not keen on desecrating anyone’s religious buildings. There’s something specially selfish and arrogant about trampling on the deepest sensitivities of others in this way. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that you could get into quite serious trouble for doing a ‘Pussy Riot’ type of action in St Paul’s, Notre Dame de Paris, St Peter’s, Washington National Cathedral, and in major religious buildings in many other free countries. I wouldn’t recommend doing it in a Mosque anywhere, free country or otherwise.

It’s not just free speech we’re talking about here. It’s attention-seeking disruption of someone else’s sacred space, quite easily classified as some sort of breach of the peace in any legal system. Now, for me, a penalty along the lines of six weeks spent publicly scrubbing the cathedral steps on their knees rather early in the morning would be rather more to the point than some penal colony. We should make much more effort, in the world in general, to make the punishment fit the crime. I don’t regard these women as specially pleasant, let alone as heroines of the struggle for free expression. Struggle to gain attention, more likely. You’ll note that there’s never been any suggestion that the authorities have the wrong people, so if Russian law is in any way comparable to the laws of counties like our on this subject, and if it unquestionably bans such behaviour in cathedrals, and prescribes certain penalties for it, then that’s not lawless. And if they’d performed their little concert in a Moscow café, I doubt if anything would never again have been heard of it. It was the location, location, location that did it. They got the publicity. Maybe they underestimated the reaction,. And if Putin’s repressive hellhole was as bad as they say it is, how come they did that? Cause that sort of trouble even in Brezhnev’s Red Square, let alone Stalin’s, and it would have been a guaranteed one-way ticket to the far side of the Urals.

So, while the penalty is harsh and unjustified, this isn’t really a matter of free speech (unlike Turkey’s behaviour) , and it isn’t a matter of a trumped-up charge because they did do what they’re accused of, and it isn’t lawless, because they broke a pre-existing law. I don’t think much of Russia’s criminal justice system. But then again, in quite different ways, I don’t think much of ours either, and ours is getting worse all the time, whereas Russia’s has in recent years got a bit better than it was under Communism. Not much. Not enough. But a bit. Press allowed in the court, for a start.

It’s all really a matter of degree. You can think the penalty harsh ( as I do) , without necessarily endorsing the view that this is the most worrying and important breach of human liberty on the planet just now.

And in my view, as I’ve said before, Russia gets it in the neck (and loyally globalist Turkey doesn’t) because Russia still stands up for its own national sovereignty (and that of other countries) and the Globalist League, headed by the ghastly Hillary Clinton, want to teach Russia a lesson for that. Hence the ‘New Cold War’, a pointless conflict against a country that’s no threat to us, and isn’t by the (admittedly grim) standards of the modern world outstandingly repressive, and the wild excitement over ‘Pussy Riot’(You must add into this the dubious media delight in, and the public’s dubious response to, film and pictures of young women in cages or in handcuffs. Fifty shades of what, did you say?).

A couple of other points. The Cathedral of Christ the Saviour is a very interesting building, and the decision by the women to misbehave in it might have been informed by facts not known to most Westerners.

It was always a bit political. It was originally built as a monument to Russia’s survival of the Napoleonic invasion. It was never very beautiful. Moscow had many other older, more graceful churches (though a terrible number were lost to Communist hate and destruction in the Stalin era, and their riches plundered to decorate the Pharaonic , slave-built Moscow metro, a precious few survived the decades of neglect and state spite. The repeated anti-religious campaigns, the theft or silencing of bells and the general marginalisation of God in the Soviet Empire ) .

Its position, in a commanding spot visible from many part of Moscow, made it specially irritating to the Communists, who wanted Moscow to be a Godless city. They also wanted to build a hideous ‘Palace of the Soviets’ on the spot, topped by an enormous statue of Lenin, so replacing a cathedral dedicated to the saviour of mankind, with one dedicated to a mass murderer. On a winter’s day in 1931, the Bolsheviks blew the cathedral to pieces A famous photograph of this moment can be found in many places on the Internet. (See below)

The palace of the Soviets was never built, though the foundations were. Moscow rumour, when I lived there, stated that engineers had warned that the foundations would never support the planned structure, which was intended to be more than 1,600 feet high. Whatever the reason, the foundations languished for many years, until the whole site was turned into an enormous open-air swimming pool. This pool still occupied the spot all the time I spent in Moscow, and when, ten years later, I returned, the single most astonishing change was the rebuilt cathedral. I was glad to see it, not because it was a particularly attractive building but because it emphasised that the Communist period, the real reason for the Cold War and the real cause of most of Russia’s miseries, was definitively over. Whatever happened next, that was not going to come back. I suspect quite a few ordinary Muscovites, who have lived in a country where God was banned, feel the same way. But who cares what they think?

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16 October 2011 8:58 AM

Hypocrisy isn’t what it used to be. Once, Christian preachers would thunder about the virtues of marriage and then be discovered canoodling with women who weren’t their wives. Everyone would laugh.

Now, pious politically correct persons seek, by innuendo and hint, nudge and wink, to damage a Cabinet Minister by suggesting that he is a secret homosexual. And nobody laughs at the slimy dishonesty of it all.

Everyone pretends to be very concerned about the ‘Ministerial Code’, and about various boring meetings in hotels which may or may not have been attended by some youth.

They even discover, with feigned horror, that the Ministry of Defence is sometimes approached by people who want to make money by selling weapons. Gosh.

But none of this serious, detailed stuff is the real point of what’s really being said. Everyone knows it. Nobody admits it.

Here’s what is really happening. The modish Left know deep down that the public don’t agree with them about homosexuality. In private, they themselves may not even believe the noble public statements they so often make.

And so, without ever openly admitting what they are up to, they destroyed a Minister they disliked for allegedly doing something they officially approve of.

I am no friend of Liam Fox. I know nothing about his private life and care less. But I think it is a very dirty business that Left-wing newspapers, which claim to believe that homosexuality is no different from heterosexuality, behave in this way.

It’s particularly striking that this came almost immediately after the Prime Minister deliberately teased what is left of the Tory Party by saying he favoured homosexual marriage.

I suspect that Mr Cameron was trying to goad the enfeebled Right wing of his party. If they had reacted, he would have crushed them to show who’s boss.

The Left – and Mr Cameron is of the Left – have done this for many years. Moral conservatives have foolishly lumbered into the trap by objecting. And so they have allowed themselves to be smeared as the cruel persecutors of a gentle minority.

But the events of the past week show clearly that the Left, for all their noisy sanctity on the subject, are far from free of prejudice against homosexuals, and quite ready to use such bigotry when it suits them to do so.

Protecting the wrong flock

How typical of the furry Archbishop of Canterbury that he can stand up against the persecution of Christianity in Africa, but isn’t aware of it here.

We shall see in time if he did any good by sharing tea and scones with the sinister Robert Mugabe.I doubt it.

But his behaviour is typical of a church which has been so obsessed with the Third World for so long that it has forgotten the country of its birth, where legions of bureaucrats – often aided by soppy vicars – are quietly strangling the Christian faith.

My guess is that there will be a thriving Anglican church in Africa several centuries after Canterbury Cathedral has been converted into a mosque, and St Paul’s into a museum.

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A worrying film of a worrying book, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is about to open in this country.

It concerns the culprit of a school massacre, and – though the fictional killer is on SSRI ‘antidepressant’ medication, as almost all such killers are – neither book nor film grasps the significance of this. They minimise it. What a pity.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the alleged culprit of the latest rampage killing, Scott Dekraai of Seal Beach, California, is said to have been suffering from ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’, which in the USA is often ‘treated’ with SSRI pills. He is also said by his ex-wife to be ‘a diagnosed bipolar individual who has problems with his own medication and his reaction to same’.

Eight more people are dead, quite possibly at the hands of someone who had been taking ‘antidepressants’. Isn’t it time the authorities looked into this connection?

********************************************************************* Rock superstars such as ‘Sir’ Paul McCartney are the new aristocracy.

Normal human beings bow and simper in their presence, their path is cleared through life, and their dull, unoriginal thoughts are treated with respect.

They also exude a tremendous smugness, these vegetarian, animal-loving, charity-supporting types who cram their unfortunate children into state schools to prove that a billion pounds hasn’t turned them into conservatives.

But when it comes to basic neighbourly behaviour, they are as yobbish as the over-rated music that made them rich and famous. Council officials had to be called to the McCartney wedding party in London in the small hours of last Monday to get him to turn down the racket.

If he’s so nice, why didn’t it cross his mind that others have jobs to go to and might need to sleep?

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In a prison in ‘liberated’ Libya, Amnesty International inspectors report having seen instruments of torture and having heard ‘whipping and screams’ from a cell.

There is also clear evidence of racial bigotry in the savage treatment of non-Arab Africans. So, if we intervened there to ‘protect civilians’, why aren’t we intervening now?

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Street demonstrations are usually a waste of time at best. But they can also be dangerous or harmful. And I must appeal to any readers I have in Boston in Lincolnshire to stay away from a march against immigration planned to take place there next month. I also appeal to the organisers of the march to call it off. And I’m hoping for sleet, and a strong east wind off the Wash, on that day. Let me explain.

Some weeks ago I described the damage that stupid Government policies have done to Boston, which now has a huge migrant population mainly from Eastern Europe.

I did not blame the migrants, whose enterprise I admire, or those who employed them. I hoped to illustrate the wrongness of our open borders, and of the EU membership that forces us to keep them open. I also wanted to assail the terrible schools, the dim welfare policies and the family breakdown that have left so many British-born young people unemployable.

Some concrete-headed councillor in Boston chose to attack what I had written, and cast doubt on its truth, reasonably angering many Bostonians who knew that what I had said was correct.

But a demonstration in such a place can do no good, and may well cause tension and bring undesirable political chancers to the town. Already, an outfit called ‘Unite Against Fascism’ (what ‘fascism’, by the way?) is planning a counter- demonstration on the same day. Just imagine the stupidities that could lead to.

If there is trouble, it will only damage the cause of those who want common sense to prevail in this country again. Call it off.

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21 July 2011 1:32 PM

On and on it goes. Mr ‘Beaufrere’ claims to be ‘honestly’ unable to understand my position on alcohol. Well, I am ‘honestly’ unable to help him further. Can anyone else explain it to him? I doubt it. His problem is not with the explanation, but with his determination, derived from received wisdom and so not susceptible to examination, to believe that the existence of legal alcohol is an absolute obstacle to laws against cannabis. Against such an obstacle, the intelligence of Einstein, the forensic power of Sherlock Holmes and the eloquence of Abraham Lincoln cannot prevail. Let alone me.

It is perfectly simple and has been stated here more times than I care to recall. If there were any words of fewer than one syllable which I could use for the purpose, I would do so. Nor do I think that Mr Badger’s query, accompanied as it was by one of those ghastly Internet winks, was seriously meant.

I usually find that when people claim to be unable to understand something, they are in fact unwilling to do so.

Oh. And ‘commit’ is a reflexive verb here. I don’t know why its reflexivity has been abolished elsewhere, but on this weblog the only thing one commits, without a reflexive pronoun, is a crime, or a solecism or a faux pas. I commit myself to maintaining this proposition.

I suppose it happened about the same time that ‘The 1800s’ an expression referring to the years from 1800 to 1810, began to be used to refer to the entire 19th century (etc.). Was this introduced because it became too difficult to explain to uneducated children how the centuries had been numbered before?

Likewise I stand by my view that active campaigning to weaken the law against cannabis, for your own benefit, means that you are happy to see the human destruction that you know will result. The comparison he attempts to make (whereby I decline to support war on foreign countries because I don’t like their governments and am therefore said to be ‘happy’ about the regime of the Third Reich) doesn’t work. The element of active campaigning for the ease of one’s own pleasure, at the expense of others, is absent. So not a slur. A statement of fact. Cannabis legalisers are, axiomatically, selfish and wicked. I know some claim, incredibly, to support this campaign without any element of self-interest. If this is true( which, as I say, I very much doubt) then they are deluded and credulous. Take your choice.

Mr Slane asks how a Christian can be in favour of prisons. It’s not a matter of principle (though his alternative appears to be sale into slavery, which doesn’t strike me as specially Christian (***UNDERSTATEMENT WARNING***) ).

This is where we start from. Our system has arrived at prison as its principal weapon against wrongdoing (in fact prisons are a liberal idea, see my ‘Abolition of Liberty’). The Christian surely seeks to make that system conform as closely as possible to Christian principles.

An eater of vegetables says (first quoting me): ’ "It is simply false to pretend that the Second World War was fought out of idealism. This falsehood is spread by people who want to start wars for idealistic reasons now."- Peter Hitchens.- That's a silly thing to say.’

That is the view of this person. But it isn’t necessarily true because he or she says it is. Can he or she tell us why he or she thinks it is silly? It seems perfectly sensible to me, and true, and I have explained why here in the past (see index). Briefly, is this person really unaware of the use of ‘appeasement’ and of Churchillian rhetoric, accompanied by the presence of a bust of Churchill on George W.Bush’s desk, the gift of our Washington Embassy, in fomenting the Iraq war?

I don’t think those who disapproved of Charlie Gilmour’s abuse of the Cenotaph, and subsequent behaviour, would have been satisfied by a fine, which he (or his parents) would have had no difficulty in paying.

Mr Platt cannot find anything in the index about fox hunting because I haven’t (n as far as I can remember) written anything about it since this blog started, and probably long before that. I seldom do. I care very little about it. My general view has always been that slaughterhouse cruelty is far worse, if you want a cause. Likewise the living conditions of many pigs and chickens. These things can be ameliorated by buying meat more carefully; and that the keepers of cats are responsible for far more hideous torture of small animals and birds than are foxhunters.

But as a suburban person I have no strong feelings about fox hunting, though I would welcome a method of stopping them relieving themselves in gardens and strewing mangled fast food cartons about the place. A hunt would probably be impracticable for this purpose.

Mr Platt goes on to ask ‘If the owner of a B&B turns away a homosexual couple on religious grounds does Mr. Hitchens consider the owner to be immoral, or is the imposition of such a law incompatible with a free society?’

I don’t see the comparison. Nobody suggested that the B&B owners refused unmarried guests (heterosexual or homosexual) to pursue pleasure. They did it because they believed it was their moral duty.